Maria Melina Scaffidi began working for the International Tracing Service (ITS) in March 1967. She was fifteen years old at the time, and had come to Northern Hesse from Milazzo in Sicily. She started out as a typist and later served for more than twenty years as the secretary of the Italian liaison mission at the ITS....

The filmmaker Matthew Steinhart is the grandson of Jewish emigrants who fled from the Nazis. In early February 2017, he came to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen to shoot footage for his film on the fate of his family during the Nazi period. “I want to put special emphasis on the traces and...

For five days, representatives from various institutions that work with the digital database of the International Tracing Service (ITS) conferred in two joint workshops in Bad Arolsen. The meetings take place regularly and serve the exchange of information and the improvement of access to the documents in the ITS...

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project invites you to an international workshop on Online Access of Holocaust Documents: Ethical and Practical Challenges to be held by the ”Elie Wiesel” National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, Bucharest, on 29-31 May 2017.

On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, the opera singer, filmmaker and bestselling author "Selcuk Cara" visited the International Tracing Service (ITS). In his short film My Last Concert, he tells the story of a Jewish pianist remembering her childhood during the Holocaust. In the interview, Selcuk...

The Dutchman Erik Dijkstra helps find relatives of concentration camp victims so as to return personal belongings kept in the ITS archive. In the interview he talks about what motivates him to carry out the extensive research and how he goes about looking for family members. His starting point is the ITS online...

On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated the last remaining survivors in the Auschwitz concentration camp – some 7,000 sick and dying inmates. At least 1.3 million women, men and children, the majority of them Jewish, had been murdered in the Auschwitz camp complex. In 2005, the United Nations declared January 27...

How has the culture of remembrance changed over the years? That is the topic of an interview with Gerd Kühling, a research associate at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site in Berlin, and Akim Jah, a research associate at the International Tracing Service (ITS). Together they edited the...